Personal visions at Asian film fest

WESLEY MORRIS, EXAMINER FILM CRITIC

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, March 8, 2000

I've spent several weeks in the dark previewing films written or directed by filmmakers associated with the 18th annual Asian-American International Film Festival, and now the world looks woozily discombobulated and deeply personalized.

Deeply personal visions distinguish each of the films in the weeklong festival that starts Thursday at the Kabuki. The distortions of the space-time continuum - to paraphrase Meng Zhi-Lu's "Dreamtrips" (Monday, 8:15 p.m.) and a handful of other works - intend to get at the truth, if it means altering reality to do it. From searching personal-journey documentaries to low-tech genre-busters, they seem to take a cue from Meng's title: The context is the world of dreams. If they are not always the kind that trigger awakening, they involve major head trauma ("Post-Concussion," March 16, 7 p.m.) or something more cosmic ("Nang Nak," Sunday, 12:30 p.m.). For once the notion that's it's all in your head is meant as a comfort.

In Paul Kwan's case, dreaming afforded him the recognition of a new self. Five years ago, Kwan suffered a stroke that robbed him of control of the right side of his body. Soon after, he began seeing variations of his former self in dreams. "A Wok in Progress" (Wednesday, 7 p.m.) is the first video project Kwan and longtime creative partner Arnold Iger have done since Kwan's stroke, and it is being presented as part of a trilogy of shorts.

"Wok" follows Kwan's nightmarish, frustrated adjustment to his new body. In sleep, his hands become calligraphy, and he frets that his San Francisco self is displacing his Vietnamese heritage.

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at film festival

Personal visions

at film festival

Kwan's fears of rootlessness and his evaporating identity haven't abated after more than 20 years in America. The film is largely about the joys of cooking, the memories of childhood and home that a meal with his sister unlock, but Kwan is still haunted - by himself - when he sleeps.

Deann Borshay's split cultural personality plunges her into an equally debilitating quandary. Her "First Person Plural" (Thursday, 7 p.m.), the opening-night film, is an attempt to retrace her adoption by an American family that took her from South Korea after the war.

The Borshays were told that the little girl they adopted was the same child with whom they'd been exchanging letters. When the girl's mother abruptly backed out, the girl who would come to be named Deann was used as a stand-in. Rather than use "First Person" to make a sweeping statement about the loss of identity, Borshay's video is a brief, wandering diary entry that she treats mostly with sadness, but also with flickers of triumph as she assembles the massive jigsaw puzzle of her identity.

"First Person" employs home-movie footage and interviews with Borshay's adoptive parents and siblings and an odd X-ray technique that fades into the present. It's a tired video trick that under these circumstances becomes a startling symbol for a soul out of focus.

Similarly, the suspicion that life is but a fuzzy dream gets a comic makeover in Daniel Yoon's "Post-Concussion" (March 16, 7 p.m.), the closing-night film and one of the coolest items on the festival menu. Yoon wrote, directed, photographed, edited and stars in this assured satire about a cocky 31-year-old East Bay investment banker who finds himself open to the Zen-ness of things after he's hit by a car. It's a mildly Scrooge-y comedy that uses its character's brain disturbance to avoid the attendant preachiness a less nimble writer and more inept actor would've leaned on. "Concussion" is predicated upon the idea that its title affliction is a "violent shaking of the brain" - and all that it implies in a world this affectionate and wry.

Dancing in the crevices between a concocted reality and the real thing, Meng's "Dreamtrips" is anything but straightforward. (It's also not to be confused with Ed Radtke's well-acted, better-shot "The Dream Catcher," Friday, 7 p.m.) "Dreamtrips" is some kind of traumatized trance - a daydream

scored with silence and ambient sound, and the type of context-less, urban-sprawl landscapes you'd expect from author William Gibson. The film is about a woman using a virtual world to find her miserable husband - part David Cronenberg's "eXistenZ," part desultory Marvel comic.

Continuing the allusion to sci-fi novelists, Roddy Bogawa's "Junk" (Friday, 8 p.m.) opens with a quote from J.G. Ballard ("Crash," "Cocaine Nights") that serves as a mission statement for the relentless boundlessness of the imagination. Like Craig Baldwin's "Spectres of the Spectrum," which opened Indiefest last January, there's a cynical preoccupation with the problem of gadgetry, media and the suspicion of apocalypse, all set to the tune of one man's loneliness. "Dreamtrips" and "Junk" are strewn with enough cerebral odds and ends to make them feel like movie word problems, the latter becoming a quadratic noir with a plaintive hero: "Disorder/ Is increasing/ Disorder is always increasing/ And disorder is identified in this sense/ Entropy."

If this brand of manipulated, organic reality sounds a bit heady, check out the lighter "MTV It's My Life" (Friday, 1 p.m.), based on a Southeast Asian show produced by MTV Asia. It is further, amusing proof that sometimes a dream is just as good in a can. &lt;